Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, (born Feb. 5, 1626, Paris, France—died April 17, 1696, Grignan) French writer whose correspondence is of both historical and literary significance.

Of old Burgundian nobility, she was orphaned at the age of six and was brought up by her uncle Philippe II de Coulanges. She had a happy childhood and was well educated by such famous tutors as Jean Chapelain and Gilles Ménage. She was introduced into court society and the précieux world of the Hôtel de Rambouillet in Paris after her marriage in 1644 to Henri de Sévigné, a Breton gentleman of old nobility who squandered most of her money before being killed in a duel in 1651. He left his widow with two children, Françoise Marguerite (b. 1646) and Charles (b. 1648). For some years Mme de Sévigné continued in the fashionable social circles of Paris while also devoting herself to her children.

In 1669 her beautiful daughter, Françoise Marguerite, married the Count de Grignan and then moved with him to Provence, where he had been appointed lieutenant general of that province. The separation from her daughter provoked acute loneliness in Mme de Sévigné, and out of this grew her most important literary achievement, her letters to Mme de Grignan, which were written without literary intention or ambition. Most of the 1,700 letters that she wrote to her daughter were composed in the first seven years after their separation in 1671. The letters recount current news and events in fashionable society, describe prominent persons, comment on contemporary topics, and provide details of her life from day to day—her household, her acquaintances, her visits, and her taste in reading. The letters provide little that historians cannot find information about elsewhere, but Sévigné’s manner of telling her stories makes her version of current events and gossip unforgettable. Once her imagination had been caught by an incident, her sensibility and her powers as a literary artist were released in witty and absorbing narratives.

Sévigné took no literary model for her artistry. Before her, critics had held that epistolary literature should conform to certain rules of composition and should observe a unity of tone (e.g., “serious” or “playful”). By contrast, Sévigné’s letters demonstrate a spontaneity and a natural disorder that have a highly interesting conversational tone.

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...insights into the inchoate feelings of confusion and disarray that overwhelm the naive, unformed young woman confronted with the experienced seducer. The other great woman writer of her age, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, produced an intimate, informal style of letter writing that was nevertheless composed with a careful eye to literary effect. Mme de...

...In the New World, the American Colonies began to develop a scattered biographical activity, none of it of lasting importance. France offers the celebrated Letters of the Marquise de Sévigné to her daughter, an intimate history of the Age of Louis XIV; numerous memoirs, such as those of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, and the acerbic ones of the...

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(1626-96).Beautiful and witty, Madame de Sevigne has been called the "queen of letter writers." She was born in Paris on Feb. 5, 1626, and was christened Marie. Her family name was de Rabutin-Chantal. When she was six she became the ward of her uncle, the abbe de Livry, who saw to it that she received an excellent education.